describe the nexus of personal and collective
experiences of social, built and natural environ-
ments; tease out the constituent processes of
individual and collective identities in relation to
power; and explore the possibilities of bodily
activities in specific spaces. The body, too, can
be ‘recovered’ from classical works, as for exam-
ple, Marx’s ‘sensual body’ in ‘Private Property
and Communism’, the ‘alienated body’ in
‘Estranged Labour’ and the ‘labouring body’ in
Capital(Marx, 1964; 1967). This recovery pro-
ject, possibly (and perhaps wrongly) criticized
for salvaging modernist thinkers in postmodern
times, is fully participating in constituting a truly
embodied social geography wherein the body
itself is both the subject of theory and a site for
theorizing the social.
The same can be said for works in geography.
Gill Valentine (1999: 329) makes this point
when she identifies David Seamon’s (1979) early
work that looks at the ways through which
bodies move through everyday spaces. Seamon’s
work is representative of one strand of ‘body
work’ of the humanist tradition that emerged in
contradistinction to Sauerian cultural geography.
These humanist interpretations of lifeworlds and
even some of the early auto/biographical writ-
ings in geography could be considered ‘body
work’ in that they try to account for the way in
which the body ‘fits’ into society (for example,
Billinge et al., 1984; Buttimer, 1976; Buttimer
and Hägerstrand, 1988; Eyles, 1985; Pred, 1981;
Sauer, 1931). As Valentine (1999: 329) further
argues, echoing Chris Shilling (1993: 9), the
body clearly has been ingeography, but such
a claim has not been made apparent. These
spatialized‘bodies’ have been ‘hidden’ through
subsequent iterations of other, perhaps more
immediately relevant at the time, theoretical
points/spaces of any one piece, resulting in read-
ings that did not emphasize the body, its context
or the implications of knowledge arising out of
bodily activities. While not merely objects of
study, the bodies in these types of geographies
are still discrete entities that engage external
environments, are end products of identity forma-
tion processes and perform through pre-scripted
norms. This social geography of the body, or
social geographies of bodies, are important in
detailing connections among bodies, spaces and
places.
In contrast to a social geography of the body,
an embodied social geography is not simply a
geography interested in exploring the body as a
discrete entity. Separating bodies as outcomes
from their constitutive material and discursive
processes severs the living connection between
bodies and those things that create, make up andsustain bodies themselves. As well, an embodied
social geography is concerned with constructing
knowledge that theorizes frombodies, privileg-
ing the materialways in which bodies are con-
stituted, experienced and represented. Embodied
knowledge, as a situated knowledge (after
Haraway, 1988), challenges abstractions that are
divorced from materiality and the spatially
specific manner in which power is exercised and
contested in society. Embodying social geography
is therefore both a methodological and an episte-
mological matter as well as being closely con-
cerned with theorizing body through spatial
lenses of geography as a discipline. Theorizing
body, indeed, is crucial to how we understand
‘lived experience’ and ‘situated bodies’, so that
in pursuing the notion of an embodied social
geography we need to retain at the centre of
discussion the interaction between the body’s
analytic categories, the empirical constructs used
to describe bodily experience and activity, and
the theoretical understanding of the body and
how it articulates with society.
Body and embodiment are often unproblemati-
cally connected in analysis. In order to prob-
lematize the link between the two, it is important
to discern how the body is conceptualized from
various theoretical, non-unified perspectives and
how embodiment is used to denote constituent
aspects of the body, including identity, power
and the materiality of the body itself. We con-
ceive the body as a material entity that is com-
plexly constitutive of bodily notions, ideas and
inscriptions. We think of embodiment as lived
spaces where bodies are located corporeally and
conceptually, concretely and metaphorically,
materially and discursively. This means being
simultaneously part of bodily forms, their social
constructions and the materialization of their
constitutive interaction. For example, becoming
chronically ill while employed ignites a series of
activities and events, some of which appear
boundless as in the body that is ill, and some that
have in a sense been pre-scripted as in the diag-
nosis and official responses to ill employees.
Chronic illness as it manifests through the body
as, for instance, fatigue and pain mediates the
way in which the manner of specific work tasks
get completed and the time in which it takes to
complete the tasks. But abiding the bodily sensa-
tions of chronic illness is not ‘enough’ justifica-
tion for a worker to reorganize her paid work
beyond that which is acceptable within the range
of the expected. A biomedical diagnosis, as a
conventionally accepted inscription of disease, is
required as ‘proof ’ of an employee’s bodily
experience. A diagnosis assists in spelling out
what is at stake prognosis-wise with a particular60 RETHINKING THE SOCIAL3029-ch02.qxd 03-10-02 11:39 AM Page 60